12.29.2008

A prostitute in the red light district of Amsterdam negotiates with a group of three young men over the price of her services.

Amsterdam is a bizarre place. I was flying from Kiev to Detroit when they shut down the airport because of fog. I was stuck in the Netherlands overnight. So I took my camera and wandered around the red light district most of the night.

I especially liked the glow-in-the-dark underwear. But is very odd the way "normal" stores, (a bar, a shwarma stand, a tourist souvenir shop) stand cheek-to-bowel with the women of the night behind their big windows.

Got yelled at by a drug dealer for taking photos of him, and challenged by a pimp for taking photos of his girls. After that, I put my camera inside my coat, lens barely sticking out between two buttons, and shot this way.

12.17.2008

An elderly woman prays during a service at the small Ukrainian church in Novo Ladizhichi village. "New Ladizhichi" was built in 1987 to house evacuees from the original village of Ladizhichi following the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The church has been under construction for a full decade, as villagers have had trouble raising enough money to continue building. Because the church is unfinished, it is decorated with temporary posters rather than paintings.

Sometimes the best photos are hiding in the corners. I was photographing this service when I got intrigued by the shadows. I have started a series of Chernobyl photos in which people appear only indirectly. This fits.

12.16.2008

Teenage girls from villages near Chernobyl come to the community center in Borodyanka for dance lessons.

I've been too busy shooting and too far from the internet to post much lately, but in the coming weeks I'll start sharing some recent work from my months living in Sukachi village, near Chernobyl.

Full caption: Dance and music teacher Lesya Kostenko (left) leads a dance rehearsal at the Chernobyl Community Center in Borodyanka, Ukraine. Her students, including Ira Dovstenka (in white), and Olya Shvitka (in black) are all 14-year-old girls from the village Nove Zalissya, 7 kilometers away. Borodyanka is a small town (population 16,000) where many Chernobyl evacuees were resettled in 1986, 30 miles west of Kyiv and 30 miles south of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.